Tips, upbeat attitude keep 1-man band from singing blues

Folk musician Brian Belknap playing his harmonica and steel guitar during his afternoon session at the 16th Street BART station on November 19, 2015. He plays several instruments including the accordion, mandolin, harmonica, lap steel, slide & acoustic guitar.

Photo: Franchon Smith, The Chronicle

Next time you think you have a tough job, think about Brian Belknap.

Belknap is a one-man band who plays on San Francisco streets and in BART stations, depending on the kindness of strangers for his income.

More by Carl Nolte

You’ll find him most days in the BART stations: at 16th and Mission, 24th and Mission, or Glen Park or the Civic Center. Or maybe in Noe Valley, one of his favorite neighborhoods, or at Ninth and Irving in the Inner Sunset, another place he likes.

He’ll be playing the harmonica, the electric guitar, or sometimes an accordion. He accompanies himself on the drum and the hi-hat, a combination of cymbals and little bells operated with a foot pedal. He sings, too, mostly songs he wrote himself in a kind of New Orleans style. The trick is that he does it all at the same time. He’s one of those musical rarities and cultural curiosities — a one-man orchestra.

Playing over noise

Belknap used to have his own bands with other musicians — Turpentine was one of them — used to play in clubs here and there, but in the last few years he’s played in the streets. “It’s different from being up there on a stage,” he said. “I talk to people, and they talk to me. People seem to get a kick out of it, and it’s all a way to play music.”

He has a tip jar that looks a bit like an old-fashioned cream pitcher, a sign with his name on it, a business card. When we saw him at the 16th Street BART Station the other evening during rush hour, people streamed by, fresh off the trains, heading home to the Mission, or hurrying back the other way down the long flight of steps from the street, a constant flow, like salmon in a river.

Belknap had set up at the foot of the escalator and twin staircases, part of the scene that makes a city different from a small town. He has to play and sing loud enough to carry over the subway station sounds — the unique whine BART trains make, the stentorian public address announcements — “Nine-car Fremont train in two minutes. Ten-car Daly City train now approaching” — mixed with the murmuring talk of the passing crowd. Belknap has to play loud enough to be heard, but not too loud so that somebody will sic the cops on him. Just loud enough, a trick street musicians learn.

One in 100 or maybe 1 in 200 people walking by dropped a dollar bill in the jar. It was enough. “I do all right,” he said.

Belknap sits on a folding stool as he plays and sings. He is clean shaven, with the lined face of a man who has seen a lot. He is 55, born in Niagara Falls, N.Y., left home as a kid, hitchhiked across the country, with stops in New Orleans and San Francisco. “You know what they say,” he said, “San Francisco is open-minded and New Orleans is openhearted.”

There is a New Orleans flavor to his music. “I always liked Professor Longhair,” he said. That would be Henry Roeland “Roy” Byrd, the pianist and blues singer. “You know,” Belknap said, “the Bach of Rock.”

Tips, upbeat attitude keep 1-man band from singing blues

1of6Folk musician Brian Belknap during his afternoon session at the 16th Street BART station on November 19, 2015. He plays several instruments including the accordion, mandolin, harmonica, lap steel, slide & acoustic guitar.Photo: Franchon Smith, The Chronicle

2of6Musician Brian Belknap sets up for his afternoon session at the 16th Street BART station on November 19, 2015. He plays several instruments including the accordion, mandolin, harmonica, lap steel, slide & acoustic guitar.Photo: Franchon Smith, The Chronicle

3of6Musician Brian Belknap sets up for his afternoon session at the 16th Street BART station on November 19, 2015. He plays several instruments including the accordion, mandolin, harmonica, lap steel, slide & acoustic guitar.Photo: Franchon Smith, The Chronicle

4of6Folk musician Brian Belknap setting up for his harmonica collection for his afternoon session at the 16th Street BART station on November 19, 2015. He plays several instruments including the accordion, mandolin, harmonica, lap steel, slide & acoustic guitar.Photo: Franchon Smith, The Chronicle

5of6Folk musician Brian Belknap playing his accordion at the 16th Street BART station on November 19, 2015. He plays several instruments including the accordion, mandolin, harmonica, lap steel, slide & acoustic guitar.Photo: Franchon Smith, The Chronicle

6of6A view front the station agents booth, folk musician Brian Belknap playing during the afternoon commit at the 16th Street BART station on November 19, 2015. He plays several instruments including the accordion, mandolin, harmonica, lap steel, slide & acoustic guitar.Photo: Franchon Smith, The Chronicle

Belknap taught himself music as he knocked around the country. He did hard work, factories, manual labor. He saw a lot of things he didn’t like, and they turned him into a socialist. “There’s always a radical edge in music,” he said. “Woody Guthrie, Joe Hill and people in between.”

He is worried about the way things are going in San Francisco. “It’s tough here,” he said. “I lot of people I know can’t make it here anymore.”

Belknap got evicted from a flat he had in the Mission not long ago, but now he lives in the Excelsior, just beyond the rising tide of gentrification. “I couldn’t do it if I didn’t have cheap rent,” he said. The music helps pay the rent.

Folk musician Brian Belknap playing his steel guitar at the 16th Street BART station on November 19, 2015. He plays several instruments including the accordion, mandolin, harmonica, lap steel, slide & acoustic guitar.

Photo: Franchon Smith, The Chronicle

He has some other jobs, sometimes. “Social justice work,” he said vaguely.

He’s upbeat, though. He wears a black hat, but there is an orange feather in it. Though his songs are tinged with sadness — “I know the times are hard and getting worse/Heavy heart hurting so bad,” one goes — he makes it sound as if there are good days ahead.

“You have to be that way,” Belknap said. “You have to like people or you shouldn’t be in the music business.”

Brian Belknap sings as BART patrons pass by at the 16th street station during the afternoon commute on November 19, 2015. In addition to singing, he plays several instruments some at the same time including the accordion, mandolin, harmonica, lap steel, slide & acoustic guitar.

Photo: Franchon Smith, The Chronicle

‘Our cultural heritage’

Eugene Strandhun, who said he is a producer from the East Bay, was passing by and stopped to hear Belknap play. He was thinking, he said, of making some kind of CD about street and subway musicians.

“This is a cultural thing to me,” Strandhun said.

He mentioned some of the other musicians he’d seen in BART stations, the Chinese violin man at Montgomery Street, singers at Powell, classical trios at other times and other stations. And now, a one-man band.

“This is part of our cultural heritage,” Strandhun said. “You don’t see this happening every day.”